Managing Sales AND Marketing, Now What?

Congratulations!

You’ve gotten that raise. You’re now responsible (ahem, saddled with) both Sales and Marketing. So, now what? Over the years, you’ve proven yourself always hitting and usually exceeding your sales goals. You know you deserve this promotion but now that you have the responsibility for leading the charge on both sales and marketing, you’re not sure where to start. 

You know that sales and marketing have the same end goal - closing new business and helping the organization grow.  However, managing both sales and marketing efforts requires a nuanced approach. 

It’s easy to feel paralyzed when it comes to digital marketing. There’s so much to learn and the landscape changes ALL THE TIME. Fortunately, there are helpful resources that will help you develop the skills you’ll need. 

We’ve assembled a few of our favorites to get you started. 

SEO Learning Center by Moz - SEO and digital marketing resources. 
Search Engine Roundtable - Search engine news, SEM news, Google updates, and more.
Search Engine Land - Covers all aspects of digital marketing.
Content Marketing Institute - Committed to advancing the practice of content marketing.
HubSpot Blog - Inbound marketing and marketing automation. 
SEMRush Blog - SEO, PPC, technical SEO, and more.
Neil Patel - SEO, audience development, and more. 
Sprout Social - Social media marketing. 
Social Media Examiner - Social media marketing. 
ArcStone - Digital marketing (Check out our blog for lots of helpful digital marketing tips).

If you’ve done a cursory Google search about sales and marketing, you know that sales and marketing are often conflated. While they are both driven by increasing top-level revenue, how they do it is very different. 

This is an oldie but it still gets at the heart sales vs. marketing.

The sales process typically involves talking to people. It’s direct. Whether it’s over the phone, in person, or via email, in sales it’s the conversations that move the relationship forward. People do business with people they like and trust. 

Marketing involves tactics that raise awareness, elevate your brand, keep it top of mind, and tee it up for the sale. Primarily digital, modern marketing tactics consist of email marketing, content marketing, social media, paid advertising, SEO, marketing automation, and more. 

Here’s the million dollar question?

How do you approach your job If you’re in charge of both sales and marketing? 

We’ve distilled some considerations that can help you not only balance your responsibilities but make progress on both fronts. 

Sales and Marketing United, not Divided

Your experience may be on the sales front but the sooner you recognize that both sales and marketing are equally important, the better. Devising a sales and marketing plan that acknowledges this will result in increased top-line revenue and a healthier organization. 

Unfortunately, often times sales and marketing teams operate independently like toddlers do when they parallel play. Instead of influencing and supporting one another, teams work adjacently, neither one having any idea of what the other is doing. 

Parallel activities typically result in what we call “thrashing activity”. Beware of this type of activity because it depletes the team’s time and energy and does nothing to move campaigns forward. 

Schedule a weekly time to meet with any team members who may be assisting with sales and marketing efforts. Regular meetings will ensure that all team members understand priorities, objectives, and next steps. Aim to keep the meetings 30 minutes or less and use a similar format to help establish a rhythm. 

Regular meetings serve as touch points to confirm that everyone is “rowing in the same direction.” 

Busy teams can use tools like Trello to organize sales and marketing initiatives. 

Use Your Customer Information for Good

As a salesperson, you know who your best customers are. You understand how much it was to make the sale. You have first-hand knowledge of what your customer’s challenges are, their needs, what their emotional triggers are, and more. This knowledge is powerful and frankly will make most marketers salivate. 

Consider your best customers. What makes them the best? What are the common denominators that make them a good fit? Here are some attributes that can inform a marketing persona.

• Job function or role
• Education
• Location
• Age

Communicating these key attributes to your marketing team offers invaluable insights for a realistic persona you can target.

Automation is Your Friend

Marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot or SharpSpring can reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list, freeing you up to do more complex work. 

Marketing automation can be used for a variety of tasks that take time including sending email, setting up workflows, assigning personas to content, managing social media, and more.

Over the years, we’ve evaluated a bunch of marketing automation platforms including Pardot, Act-On, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, and SharpSpring. There are so many and new ones pop up every day. 

It may seem easy to use disparate systems to create your own “Frankenautomation” tool. This can seem like a great way to save money. Don’t forget the hidden costs of learning and working in a bunch of different systems. Plus, it’s tough to see a holistic view when you’re using cobbled together systems. Take our advice. Don’t do this. 

We like HubSpot and SharpSpring because they are easy to use, offer features you’ll need to run a powerful digital campaigns, and provide robust onboarding and support that helps get you up and running quickly. 

Enlist Help

Recognize that you can’t do it all alone. Creating and executing a sales and marketing strategy is more work than one person can handle. It requires unique skills. If you don’t have an in-house marketing team, enlist the help of a full-stack fractional marketing team like ArcStone. We bring a range of skills so you don’t have to do it all. That way, you can focus on what you’re good at, building a competent sales team.